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I'm a member of the ISCA BBS; in days of yore, this stood for the [University of] Iowa Student Computer Association, though ties with its namesake were broken about a decade ago. In its heyday in the early 90's, the ISCA often had 1300+ simultaneous users online, and hundreds more queued to get on, only limited by the lowly T1 and the HP DOMAIN Unix system on which it ran.
In the years since, usage has dropped and at any given moment, there may be 10 or 20 concurrent users. As one might guess, the appeal of a text-based Citadel BBS doesn't have the same draw that it did 20+ years ago. Despite this, it's still very much a live (though dramatically diminished) system. I am sure that there are still those "out there" who no doubt would enjoy a trip to retroville, and an infusion of fresh blood would be fun for all.
So, I'm looking for suggestions on how to go out and get them? I'd be willing to throw some money at it if I thought the odds of success were reasonable.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @04:21PM
Building a community of any sort is not an easy task. It requires active cultivation, and maintenance; problems and drama will occur and you need to be on deck to make things better. BBSes of any sort are something of a hard sell; aside from the retro factor, there isn't a whole lot thats appealing to them for most users. I've had a SDF account for ages, and I can't remember the last time I actually used it for anything. Here's some reason ideas I can think of:
* Schedule events of some sort, and adverise them around, perhaps on a USENET group or on reddit, or here (though we may not run it unless its a slow news day)
* Provide something unique; ISCA sounds like it has quite a bit of history attached to it, outlining it on your site would help
* I haven't heard of HP DOMAIN before; I doubt you're still running on that, but if you are, perhaps give a history lesson or such? Most of the antique UNIXes have basically vanished, some lost to history.
* Make sure you have easy to use venues for communication. Reddit group is an idea, web gateway to whatever is built in to ISCA BBS? (most BBSes had support for USENET, and there's quite a bit of NNTP web stuff around. May be worth setting up INN, setting up ISCA's USENET reader if it has it, and then pointing a web interface at that to get everything on the same page). Setting up INN isn't hard but a lot of it isn't well documented, and you need to know how USENET works to create the necessary control messages.
Still always moving
(Score: 3, Informative) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @04:29PM
Ok, I actually took a moment and made an account, here's a bit more advice:
* Drop manual user validation. You're not going to have a huge spam problem with a BBS, and creating barriers to participation won't help you at all
* Its not obvious where I can go to discuss things. There are a LOT of forums and none of them obvious where people are hanging out
* I get hangs if I press a wrong key, and the help has options that I obviously shouldn't have access to like debug
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @06:23PM
I am going to guess you were not a child of the 80s, based on your assumptions and advice. I can't think of any BBSes that had access to usenet. That came near their end, often via add-ons that tricked the BBS into accepting the data as new forum posts. A few software packages had fidonet and usenet and such as integrated options, but it was rare to even see BBS's with shared message forums, allowing communication between nodes on what would be a private network among other boards a SysOp was friends or did business with.
Anyway, this forum is not much different from a BBS when it comes down to it. Facebook used to be very similar to a board, especially with the earlier doors/online games they had. Mafia Wars was really no different than the typical "pimp wars" or "max headroom" or "leech" types of doors, where you get so many turns a day, get so many points/dollars to spend on upgrades and armor (ansi porno pic, electromagnetic ferris buellerite shielding for the modem, pimp vision sunglasses...)and then log in again tomorrow to play again. Too bad FB became what it became.
One of the popular BBS packages that saw a lot of unpermitted modification and customization was the "Forum" software -- which lead to the creation of a number of "forum hacks". Later on as speeds improved, it became less popular and other software types for boards prevaled; multi-line BBSes being someone in their own niche due to some being essentially an IM client at 300 bps and numerous lines, and others being giant boards using networked storage to provide huge file bases and so on.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @07:03PM
I was born in '88, so I wasn't around for the "golden age" of BBSes. My earliest computing experiences was via a shell account on a SGI IRIX box at my dad's work I could dial into called brenner. Pretty sure someone plugged it in ages ago and never removed it; I don't ever remember anyone showing up with 'who', though I occassionally chatted with the sysadmin via mail.
My parents eventually got AOL, and with it, and Windows 95, I was able to use winsock applications for the first time. Later we also got CompuServe due to actually needing to be able to do PPP from non-Windows machines (!go pppconnect for anyone who remembers), as I was using OS/2 Warp at the time. I'd played with FreeBSD but it wasn't until some time later I even experimented with Linux, and it was several years later I actually switched fulltime.
At that time, it was still possible to use the text interface on CIS to browse the forms. As such, most of my impressions of BBSes come from CompuServe, and not the general BBSes users here might be familiar with. I must be honest though, part of me is somewhat nogistic for the days of using Procomm Plus for DOS on a secondhand laptop (which could barely run Windows 3.1).
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @07:41PM
Alright, you are forgiven. However, you are an influential member of this site as well as elsewhere, and sometimes you make statements that can be perceived as fact by others, but may not be accurate (consider the dwarf guides--lots of well thought out ideas, but with some details that were not accurate.) Many people are happy to help or correct an issue, but the presentation is important--stating things as true when they are not can get one in trouble.
I wouldn't want you to have good ideas that get derailed by other people's facts!
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @08:06PM
I probably should change my signature to say "Can be wrong, corrections welcome" ... I did manage to figure out how to use the ISCA BBS after some trial and error, I was chatting in Babble> for awhile.
That being said, I'm slightly suprised since I can't imagine that many people frequent /r/dwarffortress or Bay12 and here to know that I wrote a military guide for DF :P. Looking at my last message, I also realized I wrote OS/2 Warp which isn't right. I used OS/2 2.1, installed from 29 floppy disks (and frequently needed to reinsert 23 of them whenever you changed system settings).
Still always moving
(Score: 1) by Grayson on Tuesday July 21 2015, @01:08PM
> * Drop manual user validation. You're not going to have a huge spam problem with a BBS, and creating barriers to participation won't help you at all
I agree with this one. However I doubt that is the primary barrier, as I doubt most people even make it that far. (longtime user of ISCABBS here).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:52AM
HP DOMAIN is probably referring to Apollo Computer's Domain/OS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS [wikipedia.org]).
I was fortunate enough to have used both Multics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics [wikipedia.org]) and Domain/OS. While not perfect, both systems were a joy to use.
I am forever indebted to those who were involved developing these systems. I attribute much of my success from the lessons that I learned while I had access to these wonderful environments.